Many parasites live within or on animals. One class of parasites lives within the digestive tracts of animals, such as sheep. These parasites can cause a wide range of problems, including disease and even death if left untreated. In agricultural settings, parasitic infections can have a serious impact on productivity of livestock. Furthermore, in some instances, such infections may have detrimental effects on humans who come into contact with the livestock.
To lessen these effects, there is on-going work to develop new medications and other treatments to reduce or eliminate parasitic infections. When a potential new treatment is developed, testing is performed to evaluate its efficacy. Existing testing methods involve extracting samples from animals' digestive tracts with various treatment and infection statuses (e.g., a group that is infected and untreated, a group that is infected and been treated, and an uninfected control group). A human then manually counts the number of parasites present in each sample to compare the groups and determine efficacy of the treatment. This is both unpleasant work for the human and prone to errors.